A spec of dust on a pale blue dot, and everything it likes to squeal about.

Tag Archives: ad

In a landmark interdisciplinary effort from researchers at the University of Maryland, contributing historians, sociological researchers, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists have determined that as of 1994, nothing is in fact as good as it used to be.

While folk wisdom has long concluded that “the good old days” have come and gone, the team and UofM, led by anthropologist Nas Taljik have confirmed that, after the release of Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 post-noir crimedy “Pulp Fiction”, all forms matter, socio-cultural meme, and subjective reports of satisfaction “just really fucking sucks”.

“We were hesitant at the outset to strive for such an ambitious result, as the modern age having acclimatized people to a higher standard of expectation might account for some skewing in the results. Things that might not be so bad these days, like the music, could be under-appreciated by a spoiled ear,” related Dr. Taljik.

To account for this potential, samples were drawn from a broad spectrum of age categories, nationalities, income levels, health conditions, and geographic locations. Despite implementation difficulties in some phases of the research, the reports -along with historical reviews of the quality of material and social cultures for long-term trend analysis, researchers managed to place the golden age sometime between time immemorial (6 July 1189) and before the creation of the universe. It was found however, that an astounding 97.2% of all respondents agreed with the statement “It’s just not the same as it was before”, and even relatively new arenas of life, such as the internet, have suffered from becoming milquetoast, mainstream, overly commercialized or commodified, and otherwise just shitty. Even the music, it is was determined, hasn’t survived unscathed, peaking in about the year 1977 with only brief jumps in the 1990s before it’s death knell upon the release of Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

Some confusion arose in the poorer nations regarding the questionnaire phrase “nothing is as good as it used to be”, with some poorer nations understanding this to be an attempt as the justification of their disadvantage by the wealthy study-conducting Americans.

“Yes, the Indian government reps in particular was quite incensed at the outset” field analyst Les Gobahk told us, “but once the semantic issue was cleared up, they sent us long letter about Baba Ghandi and the recent repealing of homosexual-tolerant laws in the country. ‘It blows so hard’ they lamented”.

Douglas Adams intuited these findings in the opening of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” However, we can’t go back now, and researchers at UofM recommend that “we all just suck it up, cause chances are shit’s going to get way worst before anything improves”.

The nature of that “unawakened” state that is talked about by the self-described “conscious” today (besides the too numerous instances of those who use this trope to defend a glazing over of consistent thought, and the resistance it meets from facts and the people who carry them) is most very likely (humble, but very very confident) a vestigial tool of survival that has and still can be vital to our survival. It reinforces a mindset of “this environment is a threat, I need to manipulate the surroundings to secure myself”.

This becomes power politics. Domination by implicit and explicit force and coercion. Pr-historically, this I imagine was the “alpha-centric pack”, where people stuck with whomever proved themselves able to get you through the day. As humans, settling was an outgrow of this security/predictability mindset. It can’t really be said that they could help it at this point, dunno for sure if we even can now, but we strive for these things, and create social institutions, value sets, castes, and creeds based upon this pre-cognitive drive.

Through the last few thousand years, it builds to the rudiments of the malevolent forces today. You get mysticism and writing, advanced speculation, and nations/states with significantly different peoples. More stability and security in terms of agriculture and technology (warfare is getting bigger, badder, and more destabilizing when it happens) enable bigger populations. Eventually, we hit the borders of known/reachable worlds. Regional power balance becomes a big factor.

I can only speak to Western Europe and America at this point, but people are people in the animal sense. The situation of technology, transportation, military strategy, and population gets so that politics becomes as weaponized as war, and as much of it is “cold war” as “hot”. The stability of society makes people comfortable and inexperienced and quick to fright. The use of money to buy rights (as is essentially what happens) and resources and the co-operation of lower class employees means you have to keep people happy to a reasonable degree by this point. Capitalism becomes much more intricate, precise, political, and global. Corporations and states bleed into each other, on the glass ceiling of higher education and law (for which there are direct and indirect fees only affordable by some).

The classes are now in a sense very minorly different species, biopsychosocially, and the balance of political power and the purchase of means of tricking/placating “the public” (a very self-satisfied, ignorant beast, like a cat confined happily within a wealthy home). By our century propaganda/P.R. becomes the ultimate weapon, and the educated populace is Taylorized, individualized, and buried in cultural candy of all varieties.This is done very purposely and maliciously, as a means of extracting profit, essentially a trick device used to give slaves the illusion that they’re playing too.

It’s not out of a Disney-like hollow evil, but the conditioning in of elitism, very-old-world models of psychology/sociology, and the necessary pressures of the monetary/market/profit/ownership mentality that stretches way way back to that initial animal mentality I mentioned, which determined to conquer the environment before being conquered. This is not a moral judgement, it’s just what that mentality is. Science has a similar orientation toward the world, especially in the west.

And having used that as our modus operandi for so long, it’s now a first nature which is really own a deeply ingrained second nature, and not inevitable. But difficult to change, for certain. And seeing this in people, but deciding it too hard to change, the tendency reinforced by the social values, environment, and cultural institutions is that of differential advantage. This creates the ruling class (whom being presumably social apes as we all, create the own subcultures, cults, values, perspectives, etc. in and centred upon their elevated strata), the behavior of which recordedly includes:-the manipulation of the public through religious narrative and exhortation, or secular sects such as liberal humanism, etc. again, no value judgement, just what’s happening)-very purposeful media and advertising, designed to elicit psychological reactions, agreement-fraudulent, tokenistic means of participation to permit the lip-service paid to equality, freedom, education, etc. (paycheques, voting, CNN polls…)-the staging of false-flag events from the Fire of Rome, the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Harbour, and controversially, 9/11 (and if you’re not well-read in political and military history, this will likely be rejected by your brain and create cognitive dissonance, don’t identify with it, or say it’s a good or bad reaction, just observe it, and explore it, ask why it helps, if it helps, where it hinders, what might contradict the beliefs involved… and read more)-The clandestine manipulation of world events from “economic hitmen”, to the importation of guns and drugs whilst publicly denouncing and “warring on” such things, the creation of violent resistance, labelled terrorism, to thus enable a moral veneer upon imperialist goals (all, again, stemming back uncontroversially to that simple kill or be killed mentality)-And as in any strata, drug use, sexual abuse of children and adults, and infinite weirdities abound, and given the public, “good image” nature of these people, and the wealth, reach, and privilege they have, it’s some of the sickest and most unhealthy behaviour that takes place on this planet (look into the CIA and child abuse, specifically, if you want something to sink teeth into).

And I could go on. Some of these power blocs (which concentrate themselves by nature) among the royal, wealthy, connected, and elite organized and officiate themselves, others prefer “Individualism”, and others yet operate in very cult-like way. But it’s a different level of human activity than what you and I ever come close to. It’s purposeful. Organized. Malicious. And very real.

At work here is the human inevitability of the pain/pleasure principles, what is often misrepresented as our unavoidable “selfishness”.

The human interacts and relates to the other animals based on his uses for them with regards to pain and pleasure.

The cat is useful for companionship, exercising the nurturing/biophilic and eliciting the positive brain states of “loving an animal”. The horse may also have this relationship with him, though it looks more like the horse is there for work.

The other animals present are also utilitarian in their relation to the human, bringing the pleasure of food, economic security, and a place in society as the provider of food. Being a caring animal, the human maintains emotional distance from these animals to minimize his pain.

The animals not present (wolves, gorillas, etc.) have not proven useful in a domestic sense, or haven’t been widely culturally adopted (i.e. a subjective contrived sense of pleasure has not been idealized in most other animals; some people have monkeys or other pets though). They may present threats/pain to other animals, or simply hold no pleasure through their inability to break them to human preferences.

Other humans, typically not involved in the production of food on sustainable, smaller scales (nor large, for the matter) widen their circle of nurturing pleasure utility to include all animals, which is more sustainable for them, their lives not requiring the direct conflict of the nurturing and feeding roles, and its painful effects upon the human emotional tendencies. They do subject themselves to more pain in light of the reality of much deliberate non-human death in their world, however, this cost can be arguably written of at the species level, where symbiotic relationships with other animals, and the quality of human/mammal favouring environmental conditions are protected and brought to the attention of other humans who are increasingly disconnected from these realities.

It is important to underline that both of these humans (representative of two points on an infinite, multifaceted spectrum) are responding to their own pain/pleasure principle, or seeking to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, in both the more fixed, and more fluid and self-directed aspect of their human being. The suffering of other animals is only consequential to the human via this pathway (or rather, the physiological and psychological systems, and the evolutionary inter-dependences between species and members and environments that they constitute); the pain of the animal does not “actually touch” the human. Restated, the human cannot, in the sense our language and narratives conceive, be anything but “selfish” or interested ultimately in anything but it’s own experience of pain or pleasure. In some humans, this may be entirely represented by the subjective definition pleasure as absolute non-violence. Others, usually by circumstantial crisis and necessity, can strip the moral consideration from even the death and consumption of other humans, though only for a short while, and with psychological repercussions. Most people exist in between, and with their own cultural peculiarities regarding those animals they “love” and those they “use”, both actions essentially being a “use”, though this is distorted by the nature of our emotional experience, if not more objectively examined.

Due to the inherent lack of any ultimate, defining morality in reality itself (morality being a product of an organism’s experiential nature and subjective between species and even among members of the more socially complex species), whatever strategy results in the subjectively defined “success” of the species, or its objective survival (which, when selected as the measure of success, is itself actually a subjectively defined success- there’s no reason that a species surviving is inherently a “good” thing) is hence a valid one, and a valid moral one at that.

I’m always told that “people just aren’t good [quality, moral] enough”. Any solution to our problems is in each individual changing themselves, their situation, their community. But they just don’t, so we just can’t. And I believe this ignores a massive half of what’s going on with these nincompoop people. Here’s a commonplace comment of the kind I mean:

What this fails to see is the trick that words are playing on our conception of the reality we’re talking about, partially cause it’s abstract, and not what most people practically need to deal with in deciding their daily life. There is no real-world, physical referent separating of our economic systems, civilizations, and individual behaviours. Each word highlights concepts and process that are interdependent, and arise in symbiosis. One cannot be, or affect, or change without the other.

That the larger systems “flow from” the smaller is true, but not in the sense the average westerner is wont to think. They have this strawman image of a human, where he is a totally free, 100% self-directed, and competently equipped being, with reference to a subjective set of moral imagined to be objective. Nothing is free from anything else. Your choices are as much the choices of the system as they are your own. And the systems you are a part of are constituted BY you. Both views are right. What’s important is the difference in repercussions of each view; a) You are responsible, or b) You and your systems are mutually reinforcing, with certain soecific things arguably originating at different levels of the micro/macro.

The first, a) presumes crime and punishment is an appropriate world-view, and if we jut take offenders to task, and tell people to buck up, and say “it seems so obvious!”, then the desired situation will arise. Nothing is wrong with the system because either the system is presumed the pinnacle of achievement, or it is altogether not considered, brushed off as “Conspiracy stuff” or “pinko cop outs”, etc.

The second, b) recognizes that you must reinforce the behaviour you want in the systems that guide behaviour (ex. media, arts, structures of resource allocation and decision making systems…), as well as USING your behaviour, to create the system that does so (the second step isolated is what the first view tries to do, but while ignoring the systemic whole of which people are subject parts, for emotional/ideological reasons and such peonic buttfrustrations). The ignorance of the fact that behaviour WILL NOT ARISE that is not reinforced by the cultural, procedural, and biological/psychological state of the organism, is ignorance of the key to a better world. The both/and view of nature & nurture.

Could it be that we have naturally inborn conflicting tendencies, like that for motherhood and that for war, for survival and suicide, and are just a fundamentally troubled being?

Might some conditions be considered a distortion of an underlying nature, causing the conflict to arise in its disruption of a necessary dynamic?
From where this distortion? I believe our ability as humans to act contrary to our own organism’s health, safety, and even reality can affect these distortions. This ability is our “story creating” ability, or what manifests as the “be an American!” phenomenon, or the “left” and “right” communities, in their various shades and juxtapositions. It’s what varnishes religion with the seal of reality, and what creates “archetypes” or “stereotypes” or our very own preconceived opinions as we encounter other individuals in our daily life. It can be oversimplifying, and reactive, and can create “enemies” and “badness” and “evil” and suffering, if not matured into a human ability, like physically being stronger than others, or socially avoiding the wanton “breaking of others’ hearts”. It’s extremes are what we call cults, elites, and mental illnesses [and what I’ve called distortions].

I find it, as an opinion, unintuitive that the human organism would be an inherently, unwaveringly self-interfering being. That nothing can be done, or that it is the hitherto fully developed state of humans -as a range of potentialities- to behave in self-defeating ways on the macro scale (beyond our lifetimes and localities, etc.) is not intuitive to me given the great creativity of humans, and our survival to date. To be so definitive would also require more proof than simply along history of having corrupt, violent, selfish, contrary, and small-minded individuals amongst those working to expand, to include, to unite, to inform, and to give back to the people and planet that sustained them, in reverence ti a perceived complex, subtle network being the Earth.

I find it no more inherent that we are absolved of conflict inside and out, and that humans are inherently buddhas or some judeo-christian extraction of “moral” and “good” (which would inform my personal cultural ideas of these pseudo-subjects, right and wrong). These are themselves defined by us, and I think for each of our own interests, in some way. In the same manner that calling an animal “smart” or “dumb” on the basis of its ability to perform a task meaningful subjectively to humans (which is what a lot of people do, in fact calling not only uncomprehending, but simply indifferent animals “dumb”; such arrogance), you cannot call someone “bad” on the basis of your good. It does nothing to help the understanding of the situation, except to outline your chosen (and often, unconsciously “unchosen”) preference, and their alignment therewith.

It’s not as good or bad I root my view of the inherent human, but as an array of interrelated biological propensities, many indistinct from the social environment, and their development along certain regulated processes (cell-reproduction, child-through-adult psychology, etc.) in casual concert with the physical and social environments. Or something like that. To say “the human” in the sense of our individual meat person object, is not to refer to enough of the system -both in detail and breadth of the world covered- and I want to keep clear that I think we have both an inherent nature, and an inextricable connection to what we grow up in (social, nutritional, ecological…), and that various definition of “we” would necessarily include these.

Following closely from that picture is a malleable, if too-complex and poorly-understood human being. There are aspects of ourselves that will be around as long as this present physical, genetic constitution, and these socioeconomic processes make up our defined selves, materially speaking. But the manifestation of these (earlier I called them “propensities” to stress their subjective nature) cannot be predicted by any know modelling or prediction. I cannot give you enough information about my DNA, my upbringing, my culture, and biochemistry to have you give me a picture of what I will look like at 30, in all these areas. Epi-genetic changes alter my DNA’s expression along the way. The mores of cultures shift, and today it seems to happen within single generations. And the understanding of all that we are as a physical being, let alone that combined with the compounds of the daily human experience, is not complete, to say the least.

There’s more than a reductionist individualist perspective wants to believe. And I get that, it’s simpler to blame individuals who cannot conform than to account for a system of variable, and perhaps identify the socioeconomic paradigm itself. It’s certainly easier to scare than to inform. And it’s one of those propensities again, if I try to reinforce what I was raised to believe… UNLESS I was raised by people conscious enough to raise me to believe that what I was raised to believe should be questioned, and everything else likewise.

We need to become conscious created beings, in that sense, if we are to persist into the future, and what I’m trying to say is that this is possible. The aspect of our beings in our control (both that selves can control within, and those which we can stimulate and manipulate in each other) are sufficient to create the critically thinking, humble, patient, healthy, tolerant, sober (not like drugs and alcohol… more like accepting hard truths, and being 100% globally transparent in sensitive matters), and good-humoured people that can have the effect necessary on the world of inevitable followers, people of learning (their pretentious counter-parts), and the social institutions and global practices that pervade.

To do this, I think we must both align with and transcend our ‘nature’. The states of our being which reflect contentment, evenness, peace, longevity, vitality, sturdiness, depth… these I think point to a preferable goal, since we must always choose a goal before advancing with beliefs and behaviours, even if we aren’t aware of the process. These experiences are in our nature -in that they are experienceable by theoretically all people- and our nurture -regarding the treatment of each individual (which likely differs between individuals) that is necessary to bring these states about.

The aspects of the biology, the culture, or the environment, or the bio-psycho-social pressures which do not support these states can be treated in a few ways to maintain the beings I’ve proposed as potentially desireable (and I posit this holds, whatever the beings you wish to be among). You may adjust the social pressures:

-Ex. sexual positivism, gender equality, fluid identity norms, etc. can alleviate issues related to repression, abuse, ostrasization, and the social, physical, and structural violence resultant; the malleable social values of people can be consciously changed through information flowing inward from outside the culture, or through various means of self-realization, and cultural mores may be erected with maintain these flexible policies.

You may adjust the environmental pressures:

-Ex. there is not enough food around here, and the group moves on to a location with more abundance sources of sustenance.

Or, as often neglected (or distorted in games of blaming and justifying fear) you may adjust the psychological pressures:

– Ex. Through meditation, and less reactive, more stable emotional being can be achieved, and a sameness of being with regards to sexual passion, ego/reputation, and excitability of faculties of irritation, pain, or fear. A gradual, incremental, and paradoxical journey, this honing of one’s mind acts to enhance your every ability and perception, slowing and steadying the very quality of your perception, and making peaceful, wide, and wise your consideration of the experience around you. As this happens your language to describe things may change to reflect a new understanding. Your interests, sensitivities, and humour may change. However, the total abolition of reaction may be a difficult task, and I wouldn’t worry about making yourself indifferent to the world through meditation (not so much as through acceptance of a narrow, flat, plastic reality that you can stand to consciously live in, and under which you subvert your authentic expression in exchange for consistency and banality). You go on theoretically forever inwardly, and will at a certain point decide you’re probably good to go with mindfulness anyway.

I don’t think “accept it and enjoy the ride down” is good enough, people. We can create the conditions around ourselves, using forethought, and scientific ingenuity, that inevitably give rise to healthy, whole, updating, creating beings that don’t destroy themselves or their home in the process, with a wild panoply of variation and subjective angle to dig your teeth into during your 150 or so year human super existence. That’s what I see baby, and I’m not the only one.

It’s stupid that we only get upset about politics corruption and the personal “failings” of politicians when they’re shoved right in our faces day after day.

We can’t figure for ourselves that politicians fuck and a get high, or that corporate leaders are not concerned with healthy, safety, sustainability, or the world’s populations, or that this war will be just as bad as the last?

If you’re smart, you’re already against the next war.
If you’re smart, you’re against every candidate they could come up with.
If you’re smart, you know that policies and manifestos and charters and rules and law will never touch the power of money, nor those who hold the lion’s share of that power.
And you must have figured out that we need to address the root causes of things like drug abuse, the flow of drugs into North America, the political an corporate corruption you could by now set your watch by, and the apathy and mediocrity of the people tasked with fixing this situation: the many citizens in lazy, numbed dereliction of their democratic duties.

“Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.”–Paracelsus

“There is no evil but want of proportion.”-The Shape of Things to Come, H. G. Wells

The common way of knowing “evil” where I grew up is by defining it as the enemy, the other, that which you should not be. That darkness, whosoever else it was, was what we are not, and those who lived lives too overflowing with violence, or drug use, or breaking laws, or with the emptiness of the human experience, or other pulse-quickening activity we’re roundly “bad people”. Especially if their darkness was visible in our light. It could never overtake a truly light arena, but don’t tell my parents, siblings, teachers, peers, friends, or local government officials that. Evil was a threat. And the problem with evil was that it existed. Nothing less than malocide should suffice to solve it.

What I always found to be an abominable evil, that I never had much agreement on, was Christmas. All these gooey, uncharacteristically cheery people, lighting everything up and exchanging useless crap to the tune of a tradition of okay music, and too-full wine glasses clinking in the mirth. I hated mirth. It seemed so dishonest. I knew the adults and their miserable, banal glazes staring through the windows of their lives at its customers ringing through, one by one. The actual cashiers, but the cops, the prostitutes, the drug dealers, the broken-spirited iconoclasts all had no particular affinity for their life and situation. And I knew this. So to put that flab of life into a shiny corset at calendar intervals -or to generally live non-employed hours as if impenetrable to world-issues, personal and cultural dysfunction, and unhealthy dominance of consumption everywhere… and prickling every time such “sad things” were brought up… it was all hypocrisy! And it was unhealthy.

We’re right to see a bare dysfunction in the man who takes life out of a boredom, and a desire to feel elevated and powerful. this is depravity, no doubt. But to forget that humans area social organism, and that not only conscious informational message packets (memes), but also unconscious ones (norms), and the effecta of each of our behaviours on unique individuals (epi-genetic effects) ripple through the grapevine, and this depraved murderer did not congeal in a vacuum, nor did the bio-psycho-social pressures which developed him (which are him?). A great outline of structural and cultural violence is by Mark Vorobej (2008).

And we’re blinded not to act on the evident cold-comfort that is an existence of being overdosed with the uplifting, the stimulating, the engrossing, the placating. Acculturation to this gilded cage -hating the job we do, the people we know, the obligations we have, the very nature of the being we are (hairy, smelly, mortal!), and staying put in it all ’cause it’s comfortable- produced what I’ve called in my life ‘happy terrorists’. Using fear of their melting down, retaliating, lashing, they keep everyone around them “positive”, or affirming their truth. It’s a false positive. It’s livid fear squashed into Pandora’s box, and put in the corner. Just don’t touch it.

The problem, as the opening quotes hinted, is not in the existence of evil, or the ignorance of it, but in measured experience of all that life offers, far be it from me to make it ‘either/or’. When your guide is to do good, or to cast yourself against evil, or to uphold ‘order and justice’, or to destroy them, as your approach outright to life, you use a hammer for every stage of a complex construction. Or, to keep the opening metaphor, apply either strychnine or soda pop to every ailment.

I have a deep suspicion as much of those who would try to remove themselves from indebtedness to the universe, from their place in cycles of birth/death/rebirth (not as in reincarnation…) as those who narrow down to the most emotionally charging, basic elements of cruelty and chance. Those who seemingly never live, and those who only live once. I think I see them roughly peopled out in my life: the happy terrorists in those of my uncultured, poor family when they button up white shirts and pretend at their office jobs; the over-indulgers in the addicts to substance and pain… no real murdering types, though. I have come to think that some element of what my culture calls ‘evil’ -I’ve preferred ‘darkness’ as a less weaselly word’- is necessary to have present in one’s consciously accepted and created experience (yer life) in concert with the affirmation of what by contrast we’d call the ‘light’ (though this sounds very woo-ey…). This is one of the reasons I”m no longer a vegan. An attempt to cleanse the non-human order of a very basic property (the killing and dying part) runs to extremes among the animal rights crowds I’ve known, and this feels unhealthy. Like trying to not shit, ’cause it’s gross and impolite an dour social values say “no”. You can’t construct social values in the path of nature. No, no one’s defending rape keep you unflattering underwear on straight. I won’t commit to delineating one act that is “too bad”, and one that’s “just bad enough’, ’cause more than anything, that’s not the point (and that’s an intellectually childish game of evo-psych sensationalism, quite friggin’ frankly). The point is that whatever conversation we have needs to talk non-judgementally about the fact that humans produce physical, social, and self-inflicted violence, as well as cultural and social violence on these bases, when should, doesn’t/shouldn’t, does is not satisfied in development. We need a space for the dark to exist without piling more fears on it in the form of social stigma. This lacking in our personal lives is one of the very things keeping people-powered governance structures in such a piss-poor condition. The rule of not discussing politics or religion so long-dominant exemplifies our not wanting to even acknowledge being involved in the warping of Earth as we know it; corrupt, manipulative governing parties; classism; the value distortion of the monetary/ market system (or the separation paradigm, depending how far you wanna go). How can we attempt any of the issues so horse-blinded?And though my people give this message off in overwhelming (and surprisingly hypocritical) abundance, I won’t give it much, save to state it for the record: don’t kill, or steal, or destroy, or be too contrary or stubborn, or superstitious, please. It doesn’t fare well for the lot of us.

The cultures I see, far west across my continent and then across the Pacific ocean, have a perspective that seems to align with this point I’m trying to make. The yin and yang show not only the light and dark coexisting, but existing even within each other. Someone has seen the evil of too much good, and the good that might come from what we perceive as a great evil. I’m sure many peoples throughout the world have lived based on this alignment first with what is, drawing social values and ideas of the sacred from what the experiences presently before them demanded. I fantasize about a time before humans were pulled, in the large share of their thought, word, and deed, by the strings of monolithic organized dogmas of a superstitious, or pseudo scientific, or anti-economic nature. And I want tonight to ask submit not for a critical analysis, but for humble, earnest experimentation with the paradigm of a social value beyond good and evil.

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.”